---
title: "Latest reads"
description: "The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it."
---

# Latest reads
> The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it.

## Articles

### [Understanding your customers with live chat - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/understanding-your-customers-with-live-chat-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Sales conversations have shifted from phone calls to live chat, making textual clues the primary way to understand customer urgency and mood. The author’s team uses an Operator bot for initial qualification and then relies on context clues from the dialogue, such as opening style and formality. Customers who open with a direct question signal high priority and expect a fast answer, while those with traditional greetings prefer conversational rapport. Observing details like whether the customer uses formal greetings, technical vocabulary, long essay-style messages, or short abbreviated bursts (common among chat-savvy customers) helps salespeople match tone and use appropriate emojis like the rocket ship for growth or thumbs up for agreement. Successfully interpreting these subtle cues allows salespeople to establish healthy relationships from the first conversation, avoiding the struggle of working “out of the mud.”


### [Dear customer support. You don’t need that technical degree. - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/dear-customer-support-you-don-t-need-that-technical-degree-the-interco.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

A customer support team for a software company does not need all members to hold technical degrees, according to a post from Intercom’s blog. The team, including Customer Support Representatives and Customer Support Engineers, boasts backgrounds from a TV editor to a Navy SEAL. Non-technical members offer empathy by relating to customers’ learning curves, reassuring them about technical tasks like checking the browser console. They also help technical colleagues become better teachers by demanding simple explanations of complex issues, crucial when the company ships daily updates and needs clear instructions for tasks like configuring DNS records. Fresh perspectives from non-technical backgrounds challenge established workflows and spark creativity, leading to more personal and enjoyable support.


### [Track These 5 Customer Support Metrics to Boost Efficiency](https://yomu.fyi/post/track-these-5-customer-support-metrics-to-boost-efficiency.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

The post presents five customer support metrics the author found useful while scaling Intercom’s team to over 15,000 customers. It warns against using data as a crystal ball and advises keeping metrics in perspective. Total conversations reveal support trends but can mislead if used alone. Conversations per teammate per day is central to hiring planning, with Intercom adjusting its target from 35 to 30 as the team grew. Response time should be examined via median and 90th percentile, not just average, and grouped by hour and day to detect understaffed periods. Customer satisfaction is measured through lightweight surveys like a simple Good/OK/Bad link or a Net Promoter Score to anticipate churn.


### [More Than Support Tickets: You Need Customer Conversations](https://yomu.fyi/post/more-than-support-tickets-you-need-customer-conversations.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Outdated support ticketing models depersonalize customer experience, treating them like they are waiting in line at the DMV. The article by Ruairí Galavan advocates for conversational support where every interaction is a personal one-to-one conversation that builds relationships. Ten guidelines are provided: talk like a human using first names, personalize saved replies, explain with gifs or phone, never blame the customer, use emoji, employ an invitational exit, know the product thoroughly, make resolution the goal, never assume technical knowledge, and proactively answer follow-up questions. Agents should show rather than tell using gifs, maintain a human tone even after the issue is resolved, and never make customers feel like a support ticket. Businesses that do not adopt this personal approach risk losing customers to competitors who already have.


### [Our new book: Intercom on Customer Support - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/our-new-book-intercom-on-customer-support-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Intercom published its third book, Intercom on Customer Support, sharing principles used while scaling to over 8,000 customers across 85 countries. The book examines customer support from three angles: starting and scaling a team, planning the quality of support, and ensuring support has positive relationships with other teams. It argues that quality customer support is a competitive advantage, not a cost, aligning with Forrester’s “age of the customer” concept from 2011. Two key macro trends—all businesses becoming internet businesses and the shift to recurring revenue—place the future lifetime revenue of the customer at the center of every support discussion. As boundaries between sales and support dissolve, the book addresses challenges like supporting free users, scaling the team, and controlling costs, while remaining tool- and tactic-agnostic.


### [Effective messages have real goals - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/effective-messages-have-real-goals-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Defining a clear goal before sending a customer message is essential for effectiveness and guides message structure. Real goals should focus on eliciting user behavior change such as more frequent product usage, updating billing details, or trying a new feature, not on intermediate metrics like open or click-through rates. Intercom’s Message Goals feature lets you see message impact and measure success against your objective. Onboarding messages should ask users their own goals, new feature messages should explain user benefits to increase adoption or usage frequency, and announcements must ensure recipients understand implications and any required action. Newsletters can stay top of mind, reward paying customer loyalty, or re-engage lapsed users, while surveys should gather quality data to drive business decisions rather than maximizing quantity.


### [Seven properties of effective messages - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/seven-properties-of-effective-messages-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

The post identifies seven properties that customer messages must exhibit to engage effectively in an age of fleeting attention. Messages should be personal, using the recipient’s name and a tone akin to leaving a voicemail for an aunt you’ve never met—warm and friendly but respectful. Personalization goes further by including custom attributes like remaining storage space or incomplete orders, while politeness requires respectful language, no shouting, and awareness of cultural and holiday differences. Brevity is crucial to prevent customer disengagement; accuracy avoids errors like wrong names or irrelevant requests (e.g., asking free-plan users for billing info). Relevance involves timing messages properly and using absolute dates like ‘April 5th’ rather than ‘tomorrow,’ and a consistent voice and tone (e.g., a bank vs. coffee shop) must be maintained across all communications.


### [Lessons learned from scaling a blog - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/lessons-learned-from-scaling-a-blog-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Drawing from nearly four years of running the Intercom blog, John Collins shares eight lessons on scaling content marketing. It provides a slow but compound return: Tomasz Tunguz’s data shows articles tied to principles remain relevant for years, offering lasting value beyond page views. Opinionated, high-quality articles like ‘Why Cards Are The Future Of The Web’ and ‘Growth Hacking Is Bullshit’ outperform generic content, and writing must be practiced as a muscle with company-wide contribution. Not every article needs to sell, but all content is marketing aimed at growing audience loyalty. Scaling requires an editor backed by a clear content strategy that defines topics, depth, and quality bar; not every company should become a publisher.


### [Real customer delight isn't over the top - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/real-customer-delight-isn-x27-t-over-the-top-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Many businesses emulate Zappos’ over-the-top customer support, but research in The Effortless Experience shows that striving to delight customers by going far above and beyond typically harms more than helps. The study finds low effort is the true driver of customer loyalty, as customers simply want their issue fixed quickly so they can resume their job. Support teams lower perceived effort by anticipating needs rather than focusing on objective exertion, since subjective emotional factors make up 65.4 percent of how customers evaluate effort. A more effective metric than First Contact Resolution is Next Contact Avoidance (NCA), which addresses the customer’s entire job by proactively handling their next logical question, like suggesting export documentation. Finally, eliminating valueless ‘dumb contacts’ and closing the feedback loop by using customer insights to improve the product are essential for efficient, low-effort support.


### [Using case studies to tell your story for you - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/using-case-studies-to-tell-your-story-for-you-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Case studies help B2B SaaS companies persuade the majority of potential customers who are not technology enthusiasts and are averse to revolutionary change by de-risking the purchase decision. Effective case studies follow a proven story formula with a relatable protagonist from an aspirational company, strong tension depicting pre-product challenges, and a resolution showing how the product replaced the old workflow. Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm prescribes that the only suitable reference for an early majority customer is another early majority member, so you should profile non-innovator customers. Customer interviews should spend most time on tension and resolution, using questions about how they started using the product, what tools they used before, and what jobs the product solves, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Well-crafted case studies can be repurposed across sales, demand generation, events, and communications, and the process deepens the marketer’s empathy for customers.


### [How to show customers the value of free - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-to-show-customers-the-value-of-free-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

SaaS has completely transformed business software purchasing, moving from sales-led demos to self-served free trials where users explore independently. Many trial users fail to experience the full product value, ending the period with objections like “too expensive” or “haven’t had time,” which actually indicate a gap between perceived and actual value. The core problem is not the price but that users receive only partial benefit while being charged for the complete offering. Customer success teams must actively bridge this gap by understanding each user’s unique success definition, auditing feature usage to highlight valuable actions, and tracking engagement to predict and intervene in failing trials. When done correctly, users reach their milestones, leading to successful conversions and feedback like “exactly what I need” instead of price complaints.


### [Talking tech with non tech people - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/talking-tech-with-non-tech-people-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

This post from the Intercom blog tackles the difficulty of explaining technical concepts to non-technical customers, emphasizing that one misinterpreted comment can cause frustration for both sides. The author, a senior lead on customer support, positions herself as an API between developers and customers and has developed four tips from years of experience. She warns against making assumptions about a customer’s knowledge level and suggests using software that provides data like job title, tenure, and past conversations to tailor communication. She stresses using clear language, like discussing site speed instead of Mongo performance, and offering explanations in multiple formats such as numbered lists, images, or phone calls, using Pictionary as an analogy. Finally, she advises thinking like the customer by anticipating follow-up questions within the customer’s workflow rather than answering only the immediate query to prevent future confusion.


### [Designing our new blog - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/designing-our-new-blog-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Intercom invested in its blog by hiring a full-time editor and increasing publishing frequency, but recognized risks such as content calendars forcing lower standards and production focus undermining the insights needed for useful posts. The blog had amassed nearly 200 articles, yet the previous design only allowed reverse chronological browsing, making it hard to find related content. The redesign introduces category pages for six main topics—Business, Customer Success, Design, Engineering, Product Strategy, and Intercom Updates—now in the primary navigation, along with tags for deeper topics like jobs-to-be-done. A search tool was finally added to help readers find specific content, and the design is fully responsive for mobile devices. The redesign, credited to Frantisek Kusovsky with input from Jeff Kriege and implemented by David Barrett and Daniel Husar, aims to improve content discoverability without sacrificing the quality insights that come from doing the work.


### [What is Customer Service And Why Is It Important?](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-is-customer-service-and-why-is-it-important.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Customer service is the support provided to customers throughout their journey, aiming to resolve issues and help them get the most from a product or service. The post cites that 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases after excellent service, while 80% stopped doing business due to poor experience. Key traits of good service include personalization, fast response times under 10 minutes, and problem resolution. Support teams providing personalized service are twice as likely to report higher customer satisfaction and retention. Different types of customer service include live chat, phone, email, and self-service, each with varying efficiency and personalization.


### [5 easy ways to improve e-commerce customer experience](https://yomu.fyi/post/5-easy-ways-to-improve-e-commerce-customer-experience.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Consumer experience now drives purchasing decisions, as 74% of shoppers base choices on experience alone, and 75% of consumers favor companies that offer rewards. Pandemic-driven online shifts have raised expectations and made loyalty harder to maintain. Improvements include using contextual surveys with rewards such as Rybbon, maintaining consistency across devices via persistent carts and social media response (expected by 65% of users), and personalizing with product tours and data enrichment like Amplitude. Support can be supercharged with Resolution Bot, multilingual articles, and order tracking (desired by 70% of shoppers), while checkout optimization—avoiding forced account creation (a 34% abandonment cause) and redundant data entry, plus integrating Stripe—directly reduces friction. These targeted steps turn customer experience into a powerful competitive edge.


### [Revealing The 3 Customer Service Trends to Act on in 2022](https://yomu.fyi/post/revealing-the-3-customer-service-trends-to-act-on-in-2022.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Klaus 2022 Customer Service Quality Benchmark Report, based on a survey of 300 support leaders, identifies three key trends. First, support teams are measuring impact more than ever: average CSAT rose 14% to 89%, and average NPS increased from 45 to 51; 10% more teams track CSAT, and NPS tracking jumped from 28% to 48%. Second, maintaining quality at scale is the top challenge, with 40% citing reducing repetitive queries; teams use first-party data, chatbots, and automation to deliver personal, fast support while scaling. Third, proactive and self-serve support are growing priorities: 70% plan to invest more in proactive support, and 73% found self-service reduced workload; knowledge bases compound in value over time. The report recommends focusing on the right metrics, collaborating with sales and marketing, and continuously learning and optimizing to elevate support’s business role.


### [Switch on the next generation of support – Introducing Intercom Switch](https://yomu.fyi/post/switch-on-the-next-generation-of-support-introducing-intercom-switch.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Intercom introduced Switch, a no-code feature that lets businesses move inbound phone call volume to messaging without changing providers, simply by adding an option to their phone menu. When a caller selects that option, Intercom identifies their phone number, matches it to a user profile, and personalizes the conversation flow for a tailored support experience. This shift enables support agents to handle multiple conversations at once, reducing wait times and improving CSAT scores, as 73% of customers value companies that respect their time. Switch integrates Resolution Bot to automate common questions, triage more complex issues, and provide agents with full context, saving team bandwidth. Intercom cites a Forrester report that phone is the most expensive CX channel and messaging the most cost-effective, and early adopter LoyalZoo reported a 50% drop in voicemails and calls after implementing Switch.


### [4 Ways to Personalize Your Marketing Messaging - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/4-ways-to-personalize-your-marketing-messaging-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Customers increasingly expect personalized marketing, with 66% reporting companies do not understand them despite data showing 80% are more likely to purchase from personalized experiences. However, 85% of marketers believe personalization should be a higher priority. To address this, the post outlines four methods: using first-party data collected directly from customers to enrich messaging; integrating the tech stack for cohesive journeys; reaching people through the right channel at the right moment based on behavior; and building targeted campaigns across multiple channels using a visual campaign builder. Such approaches allow marketers to trigger relevant messages based on custom attributes, actions, and segments without requiring code. The result is more engaging, timely, and measurable marketing that improves customer relationships and business outcomes.


### [2022 customer support trends: How support leaders are adapting - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/2022-customer-support-trends-how-support-leaders-are-adapting-the-inte.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Intercom’s second Customer Support Trends Report, based on a survey of over 1,200 global support leaders across tech, e-commerce, and finance, outlines five trends reshaping the industry in 2022. Customer expectations continue to rise, with 75% of leaders reporting a widening gap; experts advise blending proactive messaging, self-service, and easy access to human agents. Support teams face increasing pressure: 59% report higher incoming volume, 52% have reduced headcount, and 48% say those cuts hurt the customer experience, forcing leaders to find efficiencies without sacrificing quality. Agent burnout is prevalent, exacerbated by longer hours and disconnected tools that slow down nearly half of teams; leaders are redesigning workflows and rethinking traditional KPIs to better support their staff. Empathy has become a top priority for 73% of teams, but 21% feel they lack the enabling tools; building a sustainable empathetic culture requires a holistic investment in strategy, processes, technology, and people.


### [Announcing 'The Intercom Customer Support Trends Report'](https://yomu.fyi/post/announcing-x27-the-intercom-customer-support-trends-report-x27.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 8, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Intercom announced the second edition of its Customer Support Trends Report for 2022, created from a survey of over 1,200 global support leaders across sectors including tech, e-commerce, and finance, which identifies five key trends reshaping the support landscape. These trends include a growing customer expectation gap where 75% of teams saw increased expectations but only 34% feel confident meeting them, increased team burnout with 64% reporting burnout in the past 12 months, and disconnected tech stacks that slow down 47% of teams every week. Additionally, the report reveals that 73% of support teams prioritize empathy but 21% lack the necessary tools, highlighting a critical resource gap. The findings also point to the impact of the Great Resignation and budget cuts on team attrition and morale. The report concludes by urging support teams to adopt modern technology and strategies to provide empathetic service at scale and thrive in 2022.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/14.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/posts/page/16.md)